


We Will Have Our Moments

by Yennenga



Category: The Flash (TV 2014), westallen
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 16:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19949230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yennenga/pseuds/Yennenga
Summary: Iris Ann West is at the beginning of her relationship with Barry Allen, and although she feels more loved than she ever has, and can return that love with ease, she still feels like something is missing. It turns out that that something is actually a collection of moments that make a life with the man that she loves more than anything worth remembering.***A one-shot that was originally a Tumblr post, but that I rewrote because I didn't like the way it turned out.It goes on for a while, my apologies!***Updates to "The Left Hand Rocks" are still in the works, because the CW will never be able to give me enough iconic newspaper reporter Iris West.





	We Will Have Our Moments

Life on the Central City waterfront unfolded in vignettes that might seem like small trifles to most observers, but that day Iris savored every morsel of other people’s lives that she could catch. A young mother tore a manageable piece from a warm pretzel and handed it to the eager toddler stretching her chubby arms from inside her stroller. A white terrier dashed past the two, its leash bobbing and jingling on the grass behind it, and a young boy gave chase behind the dog. Iris watched the spectacle as she unpacked a picnic basket, first pulling out a tablecloth on the table in front of her, then arranging plates, napkins and utensils next to each other. 

Her smart watch jingled with a message from Barry. ‘Running late. Stuck in traffic’. Barry didn’t own a car, impatient, as he was with them, and preferring to speed through the city. So a mundane check in between an ordinary couple signaled something very differently for them. This picnic was his idea – to make up for the time they lost on their attempted second date, when Iris put on a flowing electric blue short dress for a harbor side dinner out of town. That was interrupted by a call from Joe at the precinct, and although Barry got away as fast as he could and sped back to the spot and joined Iris just after the waiter had cleared her salad plate, he insisted on making up the lost time anyway. He said he would meet her at the waterfront with her favorite Thai entrée plus dessert. Being on time was not guaranteed. 

Then she sensed a gust in the distance, and when she turned around in her seat on the bench, she saw Barry running at a snail’s pace – for him – while gingerly balancing a large bag of takeout in one hand and a backpack slung around his right shoulder.

Iris stood up, smiling, ready to relieve her boyfriend of his burdens. He looked agonized, having to maintain a light jog and not use his speed, but his facial expression softened as Iris stretched out her arms and reeled him in.

“Hey you!” she smiled. “I thought I was worth being on time for.”

Barry started to blush and apologize, saying he had preordered the meal and paid online, but he had to stop a mugger on his way there and by the time he got there the server -- 

“I’m kidding, Barry,” Iris said. “How could I be mad at this sweet face?” 

Barry demurred, and said he was off the ‘Flash’ clock for the rest of the evening. He slid his warm hands around Iris’ face, smiling his excitement to see her.

Then it happened, for the second time in as many weeks. 

When Barry leaned in to kiss Iris, and their contact triggered a peculiar feeling. Not like the sensation she was growing accustomed to when kissing Barry, the Speedster Kiss. It was a powerful sense of déjà vu, only far more palpable, like she could reach out across dimensions and actually touch the images that unfolded in her mind. The scenes were not dreamy. They had some innate logic and easily fell into place like two ends of a severed rope had, either through some science or spell casting, been fused together again and made whole. She felt it on the night that Barry first kissed her, on her father’s front porch. And now here they were again. They should have been just another couple on a date by the promenade. But something about this moment was beginning to overwhelm Iris. She needed to pull away to get her bearings.

“What’s wrong? Is that too much PDA … ?” Barry smiled, slightly confused. 

“No Barry, of course not,” she said. “It’s a headache, I think. A weird feeling.”

“OK, well let’s sit down,” he suggested, holding her hands as they sat down. “You’ll probably feel better if you eat something.”

“You’re right,” she said, unfurling a cloth napkin. “Let’s get started. I’m starved!”

Thirty-five minutes later, resealed aluminum takeout tins were stuffed into the large paper bag, and Iris was leaning against Barry’s chest, watching life on the large lawn that eventually sloped down to a pebbly shore. Lots of little vignettes unfolded in front of them, as Barry gently massaged her neck with one hand. Hipsters were chatting excitedly, retirees were on their evening walks, mom-preneurs on their laptops and even a vlogger walked past them, talking into a camera that he held at arms length. (It looked odd like that in person, Iris decided.)

“I’ve changed my mind, Barry,” Iris said, pushing herself to sit up straight. She turned to catch Barry’s green eyes flicker with momentary confusion. He opened his mouth to speak, but hadn’t organized his thoughts yet. “I want to know what happened between us in the other timeline. In Flashpoint.”

Barry’s eyes flickered momentarily as his smile froze. He looked away from Iris for what seemed like a moment to her, but the scenes of the alternate timeline, where he stopped his mother’s murder, reeled off quite differently for him. 

**The first thing Barry remembered about Flashpoint** was the tension between Joe and his parents. Although The Flash had been able to stop the Reverse Flash from murdering his mother and fracturing his family that night, the news of a home invasion that almost took his mother’s life hung over his family and spun off its own problems. Joe West was the investigating officer that night, and the questions he had asked Henry about his whereabouts, his lack of an alibi that someone else could corroborate, and why no one could find this mystery assailant leaked to the _Central City Picture News_. Joe promised that he didn’t leak the story. He believed Barry and Nora, who gave similar accounts about the attack. Eventually, though, the police chief decided to reassign the case to another investigating officer, noting that the Wests and the Allens were so close personally, that they wanted to avoid the look of a conflict. The new investigating officer was unsentimental and frequently asked Henry tough questions until he almost filed a complaint of harassment. Seeds of skepticism and mistrust made their way into the _Central City Picture News_. 

The night of the home invasion was like a meteor strike. It changed the trajectory of their lives, the wobble and tilt of their whole world. The tension was so thick that it ended Joe and Henry’s friendship and on top of the intrusive newspaper reporting, the Allens moved out of Central City. The childhood best friends no longer saw each other just about every day. By the time they went off to separate high schools they barely saw each other at all. Barry went to a private Jesuit school and Iris to Central City’s Clark High School. After pulling straight As Barry engorged his reading with odd tales of “the impossible.” It was on one of these information expeditions that Barry dug through the stacks at Central City Public Library and found a paper about tachyons and colliders.

Iris was so outraged by the newspaper headlines that she kept seeing in the newsstands on the way to school, at the neighborhood coffee shop and even in the stacks at the library, that she swore she would become a real journalist one day and “show them how to tell the truth!” 

Barry’s Flashpoint had picked up a couple years after graduate school. Barry left his apartment to attend a launch party for a startup headed by Cisco Ramon. Iris covered it as part of a freelance assignment for a much larger story slated for _CCPN_. STAR Labs, headed by Harrison Wells, had carved out space in its building to incubate smaller tech startups, and Cisco Ramon's app developing company was the first. Barry was there because Harrison Wells wrote the physics paper about colliders that he found as a high school junior. Although Cisco had offered him a job at the startup, Barry decided to stick with forensic work at the CCPD. Yes, Barry went right back to the department that had so doggedly investigated his father and stressed out his family.

“OK, stick with police work,” Cisco said, shaking Barry’s hand after the third coffee meet up at Speedy’s to attempt to bring him into the company. “Just don’t blow up your spare bedroom with your extra-curricular science projects. Yeah! I know about those.”

While at the launch party, Barry was looking for Harrison Wells, but he glimpsed a beautiful, caramel-skinned and stylishly dressed girl instead. She was talking to Cisco. At first he thought, ‘Wow. Mr. Tech Big Shot is cleaning up already!’ Then he thought, ‘Wait. Is she interviewing him? Cisco a celebrity entrepreneur?!’ Then, ‘No way. Is that …?? It was Iris West!’ He needed to talk to her. Right then and there! But … she was different from how he remembered her at 11 years old. The curly pigtails and high puffs have way to long, silky loose curls. She wore softer, fashionable fabrics instead of rough denims ready for dangling upside down on the jungle gyms. There was lip gloss and nail polish and … she was making Cisco laugh and touch her arm! She was charming, too! How did his childhood best friend grow up and out of his league?? He needed a hook, a line. But what? ‘Hey, how’s it been since our families were torn apart by the home invasion out of a sci-fi comic book.’ No, not that! Maybe food! Iris was never a shy eater. He blindly grabbed two items off of the first tray that passed him and marched over to her, still unsure of what he would say. Just as Iris thanked Cisco for his comments and turned around, Barry stopped short of bumping into her with two duck rolls dripping with sauce. 

“Hey, umm,” He stammered. “Food?” Use your words! Language! It’s in the left hemisphere of the brain!

“Barry!!” Iris exclaimed and lightly slapped her forehead. “Omigod, Barry Allen?! It’s been forever!” Barry spread his arms out as Iris went in for a hug. He didn’t hug her back, though, not wanting to get orange sauce on her cream blazer. They exchanged phone numbers that evening and talked straight through to sunrise. Iris told Barry all about the stories she was eager to cover, about the sightings and “stories of the impossible” going on around Central City. Barry filled her in on his work as a CSI, but not exactly his calling as ‘The Flash.’ He wanted to blurt everything out every time he saw her, but thought it might be better for them to reestablish their friendship, or at least figure out what that relationship should be now that they were adults. 

Besides, Iris was keeping a ‘Kid Flash’ secret of her own. The day after Cisco’s launch she canceled a date with some guy named Peter and that released her to spend almost her whole day with Barry. 

Before much time passed, Barry asked Iris out for lunch, and they were dating shortly afterward. With everything so new and so much they had to reveal to each other, they put off telling their parents about the relationship. There was a lot of lying and sneaking around, so much so that Barry complained once that it was like they were having an affair. Wally, her “adorable, but nosey” younger brother asked Iris at Joe’s dinner table who that skinny white dude was that she was talking to at the food truck outside of _Central City Picture News_.

“Nobody. It’s just a source for a story, anyway.”

“Is that why you ditched Peter? And the new guy looks kind of familiar, by the way.” Joe West leaned on his forearms on the table and picked up his wine, listening for more details.

“Shut up!” Iris glared. “He’s just a source!”

“Then why was his hand on your waist?” Iris told Barry all of this when they ordered in tacos for lunch one Saturday. Wally never got his answer, but Barry’s mother did, in the most unceremonious way. 

Nora Allen knew that it had to be a girl making her normally cerebral, broody and overprotective son rush to snatch up his cell phone when it jingled. He also started showing up late to their weekly dinners, and went he did show up, was distracted, taking quick calls onto the back patio. 

“It isn’t just Cisco; it’s a girl,” Barry once heard Nora’s puzzled voice from inside say to Henry. “But why can’t he tell us about her?” 

He did tell Nora about Iris, but not in any of the 10,000 ways he imagined walking Iris through his parents’ front door and introducing her to them. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, when his mother was supposed to be staging an open house in Keystone, Barry took Iris on a quick jaunt around his parents’ neighborhood. Then they decided to get refreshments at a gelato shop. The space was so crowded that they ate their gelatos at one of the bistro tables on the sidewalk, and just as they had about one quarter left, a rotund customer came tumbling by and dumped almost all of his double serving of chocolate onto Iris’ blush two-piece set. She was soaked through and dripping in the desert, and the guy’s awkward and apologetic attempts to clean up her chest and her lap only made things worse. Barry intervened, for everyone’s sake, and told the guy to forget it and that he would handle everything. 

“Iris, come on,” Barry took her by the elbow. “My parents’ house is just a couple of blocks away, and we can get you cleaned up there. Hey! STOP!” He warded off the guy who tried dabbing at Iris’ chest again. “You don’t have to keep touching that!”

So Barry hurriedly walked Iris to his parents’ house and started a warm shower for her, and sped around, setting up a towel, shower gel and other toiletries for her. Iris was reluctant at first, until Barry insisted, explaining that his father was speaking at a medical director’s conference in Phoenix. 

But the open house was canceled because the owner found a private buyer who made a great offer. So while Iris was showering and her clothes were in the washer, Nora had steered her Range Rover down their street. Barry was on the back patio using an old phone he asked Cisco to refurbish, with specs he drew up, to track meta human traces in Central City. He didn’t hear Nora’s car pull into the driveway, because he was so focused. He didn’t hear the keys jingle and slide into the front door, or hear it swing open. And then … 

“Omigod! Mrs. Allen!”  
“What are you doing in here?? Who let you in, and what are you doing in my guest robe?”  
“I-I can explain everything! I’m so sorry, Mrs. Allen!”

Barry ran, like a speedster, into the house and up the stairs to find Iris under a shower cap and wrapped in a terry cloth robe, clasping the collar for dear life. One arm was extended out, to shield herself from, and plead with, Nora Allen, a ginger who was in such a state of agitation that she looked like she absolutely eclipsed over Iris. She was actually only two or three inches taller. 

“Mom! No-no-no-no-no! Everything is fine!” Barry stepped between his girlfriend and his mother. Iris released the collar of the robe to switch to clutching onto Barry, peeking out from behind his arm in terror at the lady whose eyes looked like a force of nature just then.

“Wait …” Nora took a steadying step back and tilted her head. “Is this … ?”

“Mom, this is Iris West. From fifth grade,” Barry explained. “And … well …”

“Barry, is this your girlfriend??” 

“Barry, you’re a speedster??”

After Barry hurriedly explained the picture that Nora had walked in on, his mother insisted that they sit in the living room and wait for her. She went to the laundry room and Iris heard her transfer the clothes – quietly – from the washer to the dryer. Barry mouthed “I’m so sorry,” while Iris shook her head and could barely look at him. Then she leaned forward and whispered harshly, “You’re a speedster and you didn’t even tell me!” To which Barry made prayer hands and said, “And I’m so sorry. This isn’t how I imagined it. Any of it -- ”

“Alright, you two,” Nora said, settling into one of the armchairs with a glass of lime seltzer water. “I need answers. Iris, you don’t have to apologize again.” Nora held up her hand to stem the mea culpas that were going to spill forth from Iris. Her eyes slid over to Barry, though, whose face opened up as his mouth fell open. 

By the time Iris’ clothes had dried and she changed back into them, they told Nora that they had been dating for about eight weeks. She seemed slightly injured by her son’s secrecy and Iris, still feeling the sting of embarrassment, suggested that the Wests and the Allens should reconnect. “Maybe over dinner? Or if dinner is too much – ”

“Something lighter like dessert,” Barry said. “Maybe the little gelato place on … Wight Avenue …” But one look from Iris stopped him cold. “OK. Never mind.” Barry remembered how Nora registered that look. She blinked hard and held her eyes closed for a moment. He knew that she used to be able to bring him to heel with one look, something he only became conscious of recently, when some of his attention began to shift from her. Now another woman was wielding influence over him with just one look. Also, while names like ‘Patty’ or ‘Jennifer’ came and went in conversation during college and his early 20s, Barry never brought any of them to the house. Just ‘Becky’ for pre-prom photos, and even then … well, she was best forgotten. The only thing Barry said in his defense was that their relationship was new, and he hadn’t picked the right time to tell his parents about Iris. He offered no apology to his mother, even as she explained how much she felt deceived and kept in the dark and even as they waited for Iris to change into her dried clothes, so that he could take Iris home. 

Then Barry thought about Harrison Wells’ rise to fame as an eminent physicist and how he had overestimated the public’s tolerance for his experiments in dark matter. Public opposition had forced him to move his collider project to the edge of Central City, in the foothills of the nearby mountains, an issue that Iris began to cover when she finally got on staff at CCPN as a full-time reporter. 

Barry thanked Cisco Ramon and the social apps that turned him into a tech billionaire for reconnecting with Iris. But the memories turned to pain when he recalled Wally’s heroism as the city’s guardian speedster, and the fallout of his serious injury.

 **Barry sighed and squared his shoulder against the burden of so many memories**. Recalling a whole life that was real, tangible and that all the laws of fairness and justice said he was entitled to, yet letting them go, pressed on him in a way that was unexpected. Ever since Iris said she didn’t want to know about their Flashpoint lives, he eventually felt relieved, like they could move on from the tantalizing prospects of what could have been. But now her curiosity was sparking new questions in his mind, and he couldn’t help wonder how his mother and his girlfriend would have gotten along. Or if Joe and Henry and Nora and Francine would have reestablished their acquaintance. 

“Are you sure, Iris? I thought you said it didn’t matter?” Barry said, packing up more of their picnic and averting Iris’ gaze. “I’m me, you’re you and things are in a really good place now, right?”

Barry’s face moved slightly, as he set himself up to take in Iris’ instinctive breakdown of the situation. Her piercing analysis had brought him to the brink of confession many times, and only his fear for her safety kept him quiet. But ever since she joined the team, she continued to amaze him with her ability to think ahead, complete the team members’ thoughts, using her news contacts all over the city to puzzle together backgrounds on the troublemakers. She was quickly becoming the best at researching and profiling the metas. 

“Barry, when you said in The Cortex that I told you to take time to think things through and you did, it felt exactly like the time you met me in Jitters, with my favorite cronut, and told me you knew I had been thinking about you.”

Barry’s face flushed and he sat up, too.  
“And then after your father’s funeral repast,” she continued. “I don’t remember telling you to take time to process your grief. But the thing is that is exactly what I would have told you to do. And what I want for you.”

As soon as Iris mentioned that night, minus the moment he erased from existence, Barry’s shoulders relaxed as he averted his gaze from Iris and rubbed his eyes. Iris noticed.

“There, Barry. There it is again,” she said.  
“What?”  
“That thing you do lately,” Iris said. “I’ll mention something random and your mood just shifts. I can feel it, you know. You try to hide it but I can tell when something heavy is on your mind.”

“Yeah, but Iris, I thought we had agreed to leave Flashpoint in Flashpoint,” Barry almost pleaded. “Because some of it is so painful … I’m just glad it’s been erased. Those things are not in the universe anymore.”

Iris reached up and touched Barry’s temple, then pressed her fingers to his chest, where she felt his heart beat as fast as the day he came looking for her in Jitters. 

“But they are in this universe,” Iris said. “All of those events, they are memories that make you who you are. The man I love. They might not exist outside of you, Barry, but they are part of you and I realized that they are part of us, too.”

Barry looked around and nodded with confidence and certainty. Then he slid closer up behind her and wrapped a long arm around her shoulders.

“Okay then, here we go,” he said. Keeping her swaddled in his arms, he lifted her right hand and positioned her index finger to a spot on the green. 

“Barry, what is this?”

“Shhh, just listen,” Barry said. “You see that spot over there? That is … where we first kissed. Our first kiss ever. Before there was Flashpoint, or Earth 2 or Patty.” 

Iris said kissing on the waterfront sounded romantic. Barry described their confessions, about not being able to stop thinking about each other since that Christmas.

“Iris, my heart pumped so fast I did something incredible,” he said. Then he explained how Central City had been endangered by a meta-human made tsunami, and just after he kissed her he revealed himself to her as The Flash, then ran fast enough to stop it.

“Wait, you stopped a tsunami?” Iris said. “Just when I think you couldn’t be anymore incredible.” 

“Well, I stopped a tsunami and then some, because I ran so fast that I accidentally – quite accidentally – reset time by a day or two,” Barry said. “I forget.”

“Probably because it was a blur,” Iris said. Barry nodded and laughed. “But Barry, that’s such a shame. That we didn’t talk about our feelings again until much, much later!”

Iris stood up and paced the area a bit, agitated with fresh thoughts of Eddie, Patty and Scott Evans. All three had been painful distractions the first time, but now, especially after counting the months after Weather Wizard had almost inundated Central City, Iris felt that something was missing. Things were missing. Memories that she and Barry should have been created had they moved ahead after that kiss.

It isn't that she was unhappy with Eddie. He was a loving boyfriend who always treated her with kindness. Their physical attraction, conversation, rugged outdoorsy adventures, dress-up plans and even companionable silences at home were good. Yet somehow they couldn’t fill her with the same ease and elation as being around Barry. There were times when Iris remarked on a comic book or sci-fi movie or even an article in the science section, and it would land like a thud with Eddie. He would smile in a well-meaning way, kiss her on the cheek and go back to what he was doing. There were times when Eddie might give her solid and practical advice, but he delivered it in a straightforward way, without sentiment or varnish. Not like with Barry, who would let her throw off her shoes in his apartment, pace his floor, ramble all she liked, put his entire kitchen out of place while she rummaged his cabinets fixing a snack, and then he would ask her a warm and poignant question that clarified the whole situation for her. 

Eddie was a considerate lover, a dedicated provider and a serious protector without question, but he was not the confidante she needed. It took those months of grieving for her to take an honest look back at their relationship and realize that while it was good, and while _she did love him_ , she was sharing her life with Eddie out of gratitude. She kept delaying breaking up with him, because she hoped with a little more time they would click with perfect ease. With Barry comatose for the first nine months of Iris and Eddie’s relationship, she was absolutely famished for the level of conversation, jesting, fun and plain warmth that Barry provided. Somehow, in a relationship with a gorgeous, almost-perfect guy, Iris needed more.

The day she realized that, she went to her room at Joe West’s house, retrieved the diamond ring that Eddie had left to her and met his mother for lunch, returning it. Although Mrs. Thawne resisted, saying that Eddie clearly told her he wanted Iris to have it, Iris said their fond memories were already priceless, and that maybe his younger cousin in Boston would like to give the family heirloom to his girlfriend one day? 

As for Barry's relationships, especially Patty. That pushy blonde had an unsettling ruffian streak that always made Iris nervous for Barry. But she had to keep her distance and respect his choice. He was a fearless hero, after all, and if he could catch her amid a free-falling leap from a building at night, stop bullets, run on water and stop a tsunami, for goodness sake, Patty couldn't be a serious threat.

“Iris,” Barry squeezed Iris’ hand to pull her out of her ruminations. “Hey. Are you OK?” 

Iris reached for Barry’s other hand and nodded. 

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m good. I just … realized that in this dimension we’ve lost so many moments to meta-human emergencies, miscommunication, or work. I want to live the kind of life that has moments just like the ones here on this waterfront. I want to see them all, and I want them with you, Barry Allen.” 

Barry had stayed seated and squeezed Iris’ hands, kissing them. 

“And you will, Iris,” Barry said. “I promise. Wherever there was a Barry and Iris, I promise you will have all those moments.”


End file.
